What’s better than being short today? Being double-short

Some of the best performing stocks in Thursday’s stock market are — drum roll — exchange-traded funds designed to return the inverse of an index’s daily move times two or three. There’s been a lot written on financial websites, including MarketWatch, about how leveraged ETFs’ performance may not live up to their billing over several months or a year. But on a day like today, these do look pretty smart.

Here’s a quick scan of what gained in ETF-land as the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, S&P 500 SPX and Nasdaq Composite COMP chalked up losses of 3.7% to 5.2%.

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